Kristjana Gunnars of Halfmoon Bay has been a student of the arts most of her life. She spent 30 years as a writer of poetry and fiction. Born in Iceland, she has translated literary works, and she has taught creative writing in university. She's thought a lot about culture and the way we communicate. The visual often uses words, she points out, and the verbal often uses signs and images. They are two sides of the same coin.
This artist's voice comes through clearly, whether visually in her abstract paintings that are enlivening the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt or verbally through her art talks in Gibsons that have drawn a fascinated audience.
The gallery show is entitled Alternate Light and it features big paintings (many are over one metre by two metres) that glow with vibrant colours, primarily red. It's easier to understand Gunnars' fascination with inner light after viewing the title piece. The vivid colours, in this case red, blue and a touch of green, seem to produce light. Some colours rush forward, others recede until the result is a kind of op art in which the eye, frazzled, perceives two dimensions - as if there were texture in this painting.
Another piece, Invocation, is entirely about red. What does it invoke - the colour itself, of course. You should not be able to see images in Gunnars' abstract art. She doesn't like it to look like anything else.
"If an abstract painting looks like, for example, a house, then it gets in the way of the picture," she said.
At the current show there are definitely no houses in the images. However, one piece entitled World Map does, indeed, look a bit like a map of the world. But that could fool you, too.
"Look at the title," Gunnars suggests, "but don't take it too seriously."
Lachrymae, an acrylic on canvas, is one of the most striking pieces, in yellow and black. She employs a technique in which paint drips down the canvas, in this case in a semi-controlled fashion that suggests tears.
"Sometimes the work is better if the artist doesn't deliberately paint it," she notes. "What happens naturally is often more beautiful."
Gunnars taught writing in various universities before joining the University of Alberta as a professor of English and creative writing. Her work in the context of literary theory expanded into art theory and aesthetics. After she retired and was working on a book about the New York artist of Icelandic heritage, Louisa Matthiasdottir, she became interested in post war painters and their unique sensibility. Painting had been a first love, even before writing. She decided to return to it. "Get a canvas and get on with it," she told herself. The result has been deeply satisfying.
"Paintings are like prayers," she explains. "It's about having a deep inner need to express something in you."
Gunnars has found the art workshops at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery (GPAG) to be an interesting interlude. The idea sprang from her lifelong habit of visiting galleries and collecting art. After chatting with the owner of a tiny gallery in Roberts Creek, she was encouraged to give three talks on different aspects of art. People enjoyed them and eventually the GPAG asked if she would give a similar presentation as a fundraiser. Though the talks draw on an academic knowledge of art history, they are not so pretentious that they lose their audience. Two previous talks, an introduction and a presentation on landscape painting, drew a full house, and there is now a waiting list for the series that takes place every month on the last Wednesday. More about the art series can be found on her website blog: http://shipwreckstudio.blogspot.com
There's one message that Gunnars would really like to convey to the Coast, and it's not buried in her paintings: "Don't be afraid to buy art," she says, whether for your own enjoyment or for art investment. "Buy something a little beyond your understanding. You will grow in the process of living with it."
Alternate Light runs at the Arts Centre's Doris Crowston Gallery until Feb. 27.
